Review of conventional metaheuristic techniques for resource-constrained project scheduling problem

This paper is concerned with an overview of the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP) and the conventional meta-heuristic solution techniques that have attracted the attention of many researchers in the field. Therefore, researchers have developed algorithms and methods to solve the problem. This paper addresses the single-mode RCPSP where the objective is to optimize and minimize the project duration while the quantities of resources are constrained during the project execution. In this problem, resource constraints and precedence relationships between activities are known to be the most important constraints for project scheduling. In this context, the standard RCPSP is presented. Then, the classifications of the collected papers according to the year of publication and the different meta-heuristic approaches applied are presented. Five weighted articles and their meta-heuristic techniques developed for RCPSP are described in detail and their results are summarized in the corresponding tables. In addition, researchers have developed various conventional meta-heuristic algorithms such as genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, ant colony optimization, bee colony optimization, simulated annealing, evolutionary algorithms, and so on. It is stated that genetic algorithms are more popular among researchers than other meta-heuristics. For this reason, the various conventional meta-heuristics and their corresponding articles are also presented to give an overview of the conventional meta-heuristic optimizing techniques. Finally, the challenges of the conventional meta-heuristics are explored, which may be helpful for future studies to apply new suitable techniques to solve the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP).

The R-PSO algorithm solving multi-skill resource-constrained project scheduling problem

The Multi-Skill Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (MS-RCPSP) is a combinational optimization problem with many applications in science and practical areas. This problem aims to find out the feasible schedule for the completion of projects and workflows that is minimal duration or cost (or both of them - multi objectives). The researches show that MS-RCPSP is classified into NP-Hard classification, which could not get the optimal solution in polynomial time. Therefore, we usually use approximate methods to carry out the feasible schedule. There are many publication results for that problem based on evolutionary methods such as GA, Greedy, Ant, etc. However, the evolutionary algorithms usually have a limitation that is fallen into local extremes after a number of generations. This paper will study a new method to solve the MS-RCPSP problem based on the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm that is called R-PSO. The new improvement of R-PSO is re-assigning the resource to execute solution tasks. To evaluate the new algorithm's effectiveness, the paper conducts experiments on iMOPSE datasets. Experimental results on simulated data show that the proposed algorithm finds a better schedule than related works.

Comparison of Heuristic Priority Rules in the Solution of the Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem

Resource-constrained project scheduling (RCPS) aims to minimize project duration under limited resource availabilities. The heuristic methods that are often used to solve the RCPS problem make use of different priority rules. The comparative merits of different priority rules have not been discussed in the literature in sufficient detail. This study is a response to this research gap. It compares 17 heuristic priority rules and seeks the best performing heuristic priority rule. This is the first study ever that compares heuristic priority rules by considering combinations of variations in (1) resource allocation procedures, (2) number of activities, (3) number of resource constraints, and (4) resource supply levels. The objective is to understand the relative merits of heuristic rules used in solving the RCPS problem. The findings indicate that the “minimum late finish time” rule generates the shortest predicted project duration when used in parallel resource allocation, whereas the “minimum late start time”, “minimum late finish time”, and the “highest rank of positional weight 2” rules perform best in serial resource allocation. It was also found that parallel resource allocation is slightly superior to serial resource allocation in most instances.